There were other little rifts within the lute. The Russian officers are Royalist almost to a man, and will remain so, for they are all most childlike in their adherence to this principle. Some gossip informs one of them that Prince Kuropotkin is still alive and has been seen on the Russian frontier. "Oh!" he exclaims. "Then the admiral will be handing over his power to Kuropotkin directly he hears the prince is alive!" Next day he may be told that the prince is not a soldier and his enthusiasm at once oozes out of his finger tips. The next day some British supplies arrive, and then he is all for reliance upon the Allies. A few days later, the Government not having been recognised by the Powers according to his wish, he curses the Powers and becomes morose. The day following he hears in a restaurant that Demitri-Pavlovitch is hiding as a peasant in Siberia, and he is immediately in about the same ecstatic condition as the shepherds who beheld the Star over Bethlehem. Every possible--or impossible--person under the sun becomes to him a potential saviour of his country; never does he think how he and his comrades themselves might save her. The Russian officer, indeed, is "just a great, big, brave, lovable baby, and nothing else." "Gulliver's Travels" ought to have an immense circulation should it ever be translated into the Russian language. The "Arabian Nights" appears as an unimaginative narrative of humdrum events compared with the stories in current circulation in Omsk and Siberia generally. The two following extracts from my diary record incidents which occurred at this time. "February 1, 1919. Last night three Bolshevik conspirators entered the officers' quarters of the 1st and 2nd Siberian Regiment disguised as Russian soldiers. The first intimation outside that anything was wrong was rapid revolver shots inside. The sentry captured one of the imitation soldiers as he tried to escape from the building. In less than two minutes the conspirators had shot five officers, two of whom were mortally wounded in the stomach. One conspirator was shot dead, one was captured, one got away. The knout was applied to the prisoner, and at the hundredth stroke he gave the whole conspiracy away. Over fifty arrests followed his confession, with the result that all is again quiet in Omsk."